


whatever a sun will always sing is you

by orangesandlemons



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27443485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangesandlemons/pseuds/orangesandlemons
Summary: Penelope loves the spring.  Kaelia, goddess of spring, loves Penelope.  The dead god Elthis doesn't love anybody, but his priests demand Penelope's devotion. So it begins.
Relationships: Worshipper Of Dead God/Living Goddess
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	whatever a sun will always sing is you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havocthecat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/gifts).



> TW: brief mentions of homophobic violence, harm to animals

Penelope always feels that she would pray best in the woods, but the woods are not for prayer.

Her knees are aching and her back is throbbing now -- the temple kneelers are barely padded -- but there’s a spill of sunlight through the small window near the top of the eastern wall of the building, sifting greenly through pine branches, and her soul has gone out to meet it. Her lips move automatically in the litany -- _and thus we prostrate ourselves in worship, for in the shedding of blood shall we meet our King, and in the passing of flesh through flame; for Elthis is in the sword, and in the whip, and in the fire_ \-- but by now her mouth forms around the rote words without her mind having the slightest idea what she’s saying. There’s glory in the sunlight. She doesn’t find as much in the temple, somehow.

Beside her, her brother elbows her and shoots her a stern glance. Penelope straightens up immediately, feeling her cheeks flush, and hurriedly redirects her gaze from the window to the priest on the altar, back to the congregation, holding the sacred ingot up high. Her brother’s glare reminds her that this is where God is -- in this building, in the sternness of the straight-backed wooden pews, the murmurs of recitation drifting through stale air, in her aching knees -- and she’s old enough to know it. She shifts her weight forward slightly, feeling the pain increase just that little bit. She knows that pain willingly undergone for the sake of God is holy. It’s one of the first lessons she learned.

Beyond the walls, in the sunlight, the goddess Kaelia rolls her eyes.

\---------

“Sometimes I just want to yell ‘HE’S DEAD, YOU KNOW,’ into that temple window.”

Koharae gives Kaelia a skeptical look. As goddess of autumn, Koharae takes her role as older sister to the goddess of spring seriously. “You know they wouldn’t hear you.”

“That’s not my point --”

“But it is the point. They do not hear you.”

“One of them does.”

Koharae looks sharply at Kaelia, trying to read her face. A moment before, Kaelia was more or less human in shape; now she’s less of a figure, more of a body of light, fuzzy at the edges. Koharae is pretty sure this is on purpose.

“Not this again,” she says.

“Not what again? There’s nothing happening again.”

“Anyone who attends that church,” Koharae says formally, “worships the god Elthis. Who --”

“Is _dead_!”

“Some would say no god is truly dead as long as there are those who believe in him.”

“And some would say that when a god becomes not just a symbol but an entity of hatred and then evaporates in a puff of brimstone while attempting to preside over the stoning of two gay men, that god is dead. Hatred is nothingness, and at the end Elthis was nothing other than hatred. Elthis is dead.”

Koharae sighs. “You’re right about that. But some of his followers are still alive, and that temple is no place for you, Kaelia.”

“It’s no place for anyone. And there is one woman...”

Kaelia has become even less embodied by this point, but Koharae thinks that the edges of her light are sparking nervously.

“Please don’t fall for a human again, Kae.”

“I’m not _falling_ for her.” Her light grows brighter. “It’s simply that I... know her. And she knows me.”

“Meaning what, that she likes the spring?”

“She --” A flare of light, and then Kaelia has settled into a new shape, one of her darker ones -- a craggy pile of black stone, wet with a flowing trickle of water through its cracks and overgrown with living moss. “She understands the life in nature. Something in her reaches out to it. And, yes, she has a particular affinity with the spring. In another culture, she might have been my priestess.”

“In this one, she’s a worshipper of Elthis.”

“I don’t believe she truly is. All the life in her, all the vitality, everything in her reaching out to the green and the light and the water --”

“-- is energy that she is devoting to a different idea. She doesn’t know you.”

_She does_ , Kaelia yearns to say. _She does and I’ll prove it. She does, and I’ll show her: Elthis is dead and I am alive. I’ll show her -- I’ll show myself..._

Too much for now. She lets her energy sink into the crags of the stone instead, increasing the trickle of water to a stream, growing flowers amid the moss, letting bees and butterflies flit around her. There are moments where there is nothing to do but be.

\-----------------

Penelope goes to the woods the next day -- a bit stealthily; she’s told her brother she’s going to the library. It’s less a library than a room of books in the rectory where the priests of Elthis live, and she’s read almost all the books in it, but if she retrieves a book quickly ( _Stories of the Itinerant Canonists_ is her favorite) and then takes a detour on her way home, she passes through a particular forest clearing. It’s only a few minutes’ walk from the edge of the woods, but its edges are thickly crowded about with stout, gnarly oaks, thick boughs branching out just feet above the ground, and further screened from view by a large weeping willow. Penelope has always felt this is her own place.

(Kaelia, who knows it is in fact _her_ own, watches shrewdly.)

Penelope greets the trees with gentle caresses and murmured greetings. She sits on a mossy stone with a flat, smooth surface, then takes off her shoes and socks and lets her feet dangle in a small, rocky pool where the brook finds a moment to be still before passing on deeper into the woods. She leaves her book in her lap but doesn’t open it. (Kaelia wonders how difficult it would be to get Penelope to startle and drop the book into the water and mud, but backs away from the idea uneasily; gods are not meant to intervene so directly in human affairs. Humans’ choices should be their own.)

(And yet --)

Penelope’s head is back; her hair, an unruly brown mass with reddish streaks here and there, is pulled back in its ordinary bun, but a few curls twist out and glint auburn, glorified by sunlight. The sun is rich and warm on her face, and she closes her eyes to drink in the feeling. Moss is soft under her fingers; a small caterpillar crawls onto one knuckle, and she smiles at the tiny, fuzzy sensation of it scrunching its way down her finger. Conscious thought has slipped away from her; this is one of Penelope’s moments where there is nothing to do but be.

And of course Kaelia is with her, inside every second of this moment of being. A swelling sense of holiness rises up in Penelope, an experience of communion far beyond her ability to analyze. It’s happened before and it transports her more and farther every time. In fact, Kaelia has never shared this kind of communion with any human before -- no priestess devoted to her order, no young woman lighting the ceremonial fires and praying with arms open to the sky for Kaelia to be with her, no scholar seeking to tell the world of her with the uneven scratching of a quill against parchment in the light of a candle burning low. Always, with humans, something is in the way -- the humans themselves, usually. They filter what they know of her through their own needs and wishes and desires. They’re never with her entirely like this -- one with her, a simple, total sharing of pure existence. It’s never like it is with Penelope.

Penelope, the worshipper of Elthis.

A frog leaps into the pool at Penelope’s feet, splashing her up to the knees, and she laughs and pulls her feet up closer to her, then bends over to make the frog’s acquaintance. Kaelia pulls back out of the moment the slightest bit, watching Penelope bring her own particular charm to this meeting. Idly, she makes the sun shine a little more brightly to bring out the highlights in Penelope’s hair more. Makes the water a little more coolly crystalline as it slides over the tips of Penelope’s fingers, held out to the frog. Makes the breeze a little gentler, the moss a little softer, and --

_Oh no._

She pushes Koharae out of her head, Koharae who is trying to say something involving the words _not this again_ , and she looks back at Penelope -- this girl who knows her so completely without knowing she exists. She wonders what she can do about it.

\--------

Stealthily, moment by moment, Kaelia begins slipping into Penelope’s mind here and there. This is quite different from the sharing of simple _being_ that comes so naturally to both of them; this would be regarded by other divinities as a form of interference. Some gods travel this route frequently, waiting for humans whose minds are open enough to them for the gods to steal in and manipulate their thoughts and actions. Kaelia’s never been one of those. They are not, she thinks, the better class of gods. Elthis used to be one of them. She’s prided herself on not being that sort.

So it’s just the tiniest things. Suggesting little things, little ways of drawing Penelope closer to her. Letting her know about rituals sacred to Kaelia, mostly. She’s not _making_ her do anything; she’s just putting the ideas in her head. Burying a shimmering crystallized stone at the roots of a particular oak tree, blowing a dandelion puff to the east, lighting a tiny fire with scattered bark and twigs and walking thrice around it clockwise, drinking a draught of water from the stream in a cup made of birch bark, then ceremonially pouring the last bit of it out at the base of the oak. A certain meditative practice among the tendrils of weeping willow, a particular reaching for earth and sky and then an immersion in the greenery all around her. Penelope thinks the ideas are her own, but she’s completely taken with how _right_ it all feels, and she knows she’s getting deeper and deeper into something. The problem is that she doesn’t know what.

But Kaelia stops short of trying to make Penelope stop going to temple; that would be going too far. And so Penelope still goes to temple twice a week, and study of Elthis’ holy texts once a week, and participates in long nightly prayers to Elthis, and tithes to the priests of Elthis, and confesses her sins to them. She thinks the growing intensity of the pull she feels towards that clearing is her simply being absentminded, not focusing well enough on what is really holy and true, losing time that should be sacred to her god in sitting in the woods and letting her mind drift. So she attempts to redouble her study and practice of her faith. She learns of the Elthian history of human sacrifice, and how Elthis in His mercy long ago stopped requiring that of His followers, but how in their gratitude His followers must make their own sacrifices, and offer up their joys to Him while treasuring their sorrows and pain as a form of sanctification. She memorizes yet more strings of prayers and recitations, and kneels by her bed each night reciting them, trying to feel Elthis moving within her. But Elthis is dead and he’s never going to move within anyone again, so Kaelia isn’t particularly concerned. She knows Penelope will never belong to Elthis. She belongs to Kaelia, and every moment she spends in the woods makes that belonging deeper and more secure.

Then Penelope goes to a priest for confession one day, and when she leaves, she's changed.

Kaelia is not with Penelope in that moment; Elthis may be dead but structures consecrated to him still make Kaelia feel uncomfortable, unwelcome. (She is also, incidentally, not fond of the sensation of being jealous of a dead god, and would rather avoid seeing her beloved in his territory.) She waits for Penelope outside, but when she comes out her mind is suddenly closed to Kaelia in a way that it has never been before. She feels remote. Wrapped up in something else. Kaelia tries to redirect Penelope’s gaze gently to the pattern of pine boughs against the sunset sky, to the first few stars coming out in the darker sky above, but Penelope fixes her eyes resolutely on the ground. She walks home quickly, her mind a turmoil that Kaelia can’t reach into, and then goes immediately to her room and gets down on her knees. She prays to Elthis for hours, closed off entirety to Kaelia. When she’s done she goes to bed immediately, eyes blank, and lies staring into the darkness, thinking of sacrifice and blood and burnt offerings, until she falls asleep. Kaelia wants to give her a dream of spring, but stops, a little frightened. She’s not sure what’s happening, but something about it seems to be beyond her.

From that day Penelope is entirely different, and Kaelia can’t reach her. She still doesn’t know exactly what that priest told Penelope, but whatever it was has caused Penelope to shut her mind to Kaelia almost entirely. There are cracks, moments when she can’t help finding a rising pleasure in a gentle breeze or the kiss of sunlight on her cheek, but as soon as she recognizes them she shuts them tight again. She never goes to the woods; she takes the road that bends around the forest, and she goes to Elthis’ temple and back again. Kaelia has no idea what happened, and with Penelope’s mind closed to her this way she doesn’t see an easy path to finding out. Some divinities proclaim to be omniscient -- Elthis was one -- but they never really are. In their interactions with the human world, they are invariably limited by the humans themselves -- their openness, their receptivity to the divine. If they deliberately close their minds and hearts to the divine, the gods themselves can do nothing about it.

In the end Kaelia is reduced to learning the truth by overhearing someone else’s conversation, like any ordinary human. Penelope is shut up in her room, lit by a single guttering tallow candle, kneeling on the hard floorboards and praying to Elthis. Kaelia had tried and failed to visit with her when a male voice comes from the adjoining room -- a friend of Penelope’s brother’s, she realizes. The visitor says something about how devout Penelope has become these days.

“No more so than she should be,” the brother says. “One of the priests talked some sense into her. It’s a relief to see her finding a little devotion for a change.” Kaelia’s light, invisible to the humans around, flares scarlet for a moment; the idea of Penelope being lacking in devotion! “It’s time she learned her place, anyway.”

“Ah, yes. When is the wedding to be?”

In an instant Kaelia is a gray mist, hovering inches above the scarred wooden floor.

“Some months hence, on the winter solstice.” The day of the year when Kaelia’s power is at its lowest. “The priests arranged it, of course. He’s an acolyte in a temple of Elthis in a town a day or two from here. It's a most suitable match. He'll keep her from mooning over nature half her life, especially since she'll be leaving the woods behind when she moves to town. She'll learn to be a good woman, dedicated to Elthis." He laughs then. "And she'll be out of my hair."

They change the subject then, speaking first of the spring planting, then of the increase in the tithe at the temple this season. Kaelia continues to hover there, barely existing at all, until long after they've cleared up and gone to bed. And Penelope's door is still closed to her.

\-------------

“There must be something I can do. There will be. I’ll find it.”

“Kaelia.” Koharae’s voice is low and rather less full of irritation than Kaelia would have expected. That’s bad. It means her exasperated toleration of Kaelia’s foibles is at an end. This is serious now. “You need to let this one go.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“I told you not to let yourself fall for a human again, I told you --”

“It’s not the same. She’s not the same. She loves me --”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“She does!”

“You haven’t even been able to appear to her, have you?”

Kaelia finds herself reconfiguring into a bramble bush, thorny tendrils shooting off in all directions. “She... doesn’t know my name, she doesn’t know _exactly_ who I am --”

“There is no way to be with a human who doesn’t want you to be with her.”

“She wants to be with me. She’s been brainwashed by devotees of that dead god of hatred. And she knows me in essence. If I could just convey some of the specifics to her -- my name, my rituals -- I could appear to her and --”

“Your worshipers have moved on from this place. There is no one to tell her. I’ve said it all along, you need to follow them where they go. I know that you are bound to the natural world in this place, to your grove in particular, but there are ways to reshape, and if --”

Kaelia’s not listening. “I could reach her in a dream.”

“What good will a dream do? She won’t believe it’s real.”

“I could... while she’s sleeping, I could write a message to her, I could tell her --”

“How would you -- _Kaelia.”_ Koharae’s voice is genuinely shocked. “You would take control of her body? Make _her_ write _your_ words in her _sleep?_ ”

Kaelia’s a ladybug now, wings folded tightly against her back.

“I’m afraid for you, Kaelia, I’m afraid for what you’re becoming. None of this, nothing you’re doing, is the role of a goddess. There are more ways for a god to die than to evaporate in a flare of hatred. The more you _contaminate_ yourself with these base passions, the more you try to push your hands into affairs of human beings who don’t want you there and attempt to mold them by force into what you want, the less you are at peace with the world and your place in it. There’s less harmony in the world every time you try to shriek your will at this one particular woman. It isn’t just about her, not anymore. Kaelia, you’re going to lose yourself. And the world will lose you.”

Just at the moment Kaelia isn’t sure how much of a loss she would be to the world. Her worshipers, as Koharae says, have moved on. She’s tired of playing sunlight over the fur of squirrels and rabbits and blowing night breezes for owls to glide on. She needs something more. She needs Penelope.

“For your own sake and for your woods’, Kaelia -- everything, every creature that depends on you -- let this go.”

Kaelia is a large granite boulder now. Nothing grows on it.

\--------------

Weeks pass and the preparations for Penelope’s wedding pick up and Penelope is working as hard as she knows how to resign herself to what is happening, to close herself off to all her weak, silly nature-loving instincts and learn to be a dutiful, obedient wife to a soon-to-be priest of Elthis. Fellow worshipers at Elhis’s temple tell her it is a battle for her soul, pagan demons trying to drag her off the path of righteousness. Penelope is trying so hard not to be dragged. At night her pillow is wet with tears. Kaelia doesn’t know this, because she’s not welcome in that room anymore, but nights in the woods have been foggy and wet and cold, small animals shivering miserably in their dens. Days have been overcast and sullenly still. Occasionally a burst of sunlight emerges from the clouds to warm Penelope’s head or light branches above her head into verdant glory, but she doesn’t look up. Kaelia is spending more time in a pool deep in the forest, clogged with water weeds and dead leaves, beginning slowly to stagnate. The springs that feed it are failing.

Then a last, single chance emerges. Penelope has not gone to the woods once since she was promised to the acolyte, but -- unbeknownst to Kaelia, who cannot draw near her in Elthis’ temple, and who is becoming less and less able to draw near her at all, anywhere -- her heart still yearns after the woods, and she doesn’t know how to put it away. She continues to confess this sin to the priests, and finally one of them suggests a ritual cleansing. A sacrifice.

She is to go to the grove in the woods and she is to light a ceremonial fire, and then she is to sacrifice a wild animal. Catch it, kill it, burn it ritually there in the grove. When it’s done, mix its ashes with salt. Salt the earth. Once the place is killed, once salt and death have been sown and nothing further can grow there, Penelope will find that the sin in her soul will shrivel and die as well.

Kaelia finds this out, again, by hearing Penelope’s brother talk. But this time, she does not tell Koharae what is to happen. She does not want advice. Everything in her is rising to meet this moment. One way or another, this will end.

Penelope rises early one morning, just after the dawn, and begins her trek to the grove, bringing her pail of salt and her matches and her knife. Kaelia, summoning all that she is, makes it a beautiful morning, but she doesn’t expect this to get through to Penelope, and it doesn’t. She’s entirely focused on her task.

The grove is exactly the same as Penelope remembers it. She gathers fallen branches and small logs, rotting mellowly on the ground, to build her fire. Kaelia finds it hopeful that she does not cut living branches from the trees. She is, through all of this, still Penelope. The light catches her hair in the old way, burnishing rusty streaks to bronze, as she lights the fire. The breeze dies down and the leaves go still. Kaelia is holding her breath.

Penelope sits there to wait for a small animal. Light refracts through the pool near her feet and distills itself into radiant golden beams shining surely through the water. Above, beech leaves brighten to chartreuse, oak leaves to emerald. There’s the subtle, muted sound of flowing water, occasional wheedling chirps of birdsong. The flames crackle kindly, as yet unknowing of any unkind purpose for which they might have been lit. Scattered around edges of the glade, wildflowers bob their heads slowly, leaves rustling. Kaelia is being as enchanting, as sensual as she knows how to be. And she can feel it, Penelope starting to lose herself in the day, Penelope coming to be with her. This is it. This is their moment. In this moment, they either will find all they can be together, or they will collapse into separate piles of ash.

The small animals in this grove know Penelope well. Soon a rabbit hops up to meet her, expecting a gentle pat, a scratch to the fur at its neck. Kaelia sees Penelope’s brow contract as she stares at the little creature. She reaches out for it, picks it up, places it in her lap. It snuggles close to her happily. Penelope puts her hand on the knife lying beside her. Gently she shifts the rabbit’s head up, so its neck is exposed. Everything in the clearing has ground to a halt. There’s only Penelope, a rabbit, and a knife.

Kaelia is stretched out to reach Penelope as far as is possible, but she won’t move directly into Penelope’s mind this time. She envelops her instead, in her love, in her warmth, in full knowledge of who she is. And she waits.

The moment stretches on for an eon. Penelope’s breath is coming more quickly. The fur at the rabbit’s neck pulls a little tighter. Kaelia can feel the blood pulsing through it. Penelope’s knuckles whiten on the knife.

And then, in one motion, she’s cast it aside. Her eyes remain fixed on the rabbit. Slowly her fingers relax from around its neck. It hops down and proceeds on its way.

And now Kaelia is one with Penelope as she never has been before, not even when they were at their best. She doesn’t need to try to move in Penelope’s mind anymore; Penelope opens her mind willingly, tosses aside every barrier between them. Without being conscious of it -- they both seem to be free of conscious thought now -- Kaelia guides her to particular wildflowers at the edge of the clearing: lavender, anemone, yarrow, daisies. Penelope picks a few of each flower, twining one of each in her hair, behind her ears. Then she brings the rest to the fire and, one by one, tosses them in. Fragrant smoke rises up; for a moment, Penelope is screened from the clearing, is alone in a strange, caressing white mist. A word rises to her lips, and she speaks: “Kaelia.”

And then the flame rushes up, bursts up to the height of the treetops, and then resolves. Kaelia is there before her, human in form, her light putting the sun to shame. Every moment Penelope has ever spent in the glade lives in her blaze. Penelope takes a step forward, arms held out as if to embrace Kaelia, and while Kaelia is used to reverence mixed with some intimidation from her worshipers, there is none of that in Penelope’s face and Kaelia is glad of it. She throws herself forward and then they are together in flesh and in spirit, the two indistinguishable in this moment. Their lips meet.

Long moments later the parts of them that are embodied move apart slightly. Penelope says, with wonder in her voice, “It’s been you. All along, it’s been you.”

“And you,” Kaelia says. 

“And we...” Penelope swallows. “You’re a... goddess?”

“Yes,” Kaelia tells her.

“And I’m a human.” A long pause, a hint of fear in her eyes. “What could we be, the two of us?”

“Together,” Kaelia says.

Penelope closes her eyes and leans forward again. The beauty of spring swells up around them in a wave, enclosing them, becoming them.


End file.
